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I have a suspicion that your option number 2 is already baked pretty deep into actual humans' psychologies.
In response to
How I Became More Ambitious
I read and identified with and commented on your post a year and a half ago. I just wanted to say I'm glad to know that you're feeling more ambitious now. And thanks for sharing. I haven't solved these same problems for myself nearly to the same extent, so learning about your recent experiences is extremely valuable for me.
In response to
Rationality Quotes June 2013
Hofstadter on the necessary strangeness of scientific explanations:
It is no accident, I would maintain, that quantum mechanics is so wildly counterintuitive. Part of the nature of explanation is that it must eventually hit some point where further probing only increases opacity rather than decreasing it. Consider the problem of understanding the nature of solids. You might wonder where solidity comes form. What if someone said to you, "The ultimate basis of this brick's solidity is that it is composed of a stupendous number of eensy weensy bricklike objects that themselves are rock-solid"? You might be interested to learn that bricks are composed of micro-bricks, but the initial question - "What accounts for solidity?" - has been thoroughly begged. What we ultimately want is for solidity to vanish, to dissolve, to disintegrate into some totally different kind of phenomenon with which we have no experience. Only then, when we have reached some completely novel, alien level will we feel that we have really made progress in explaining the top-level phenomenon.
[...]
I first saw this thought expressed in the stimulating book Patterns of Discovery by Norwood Russell Hanson. Hanson attributes it to a number of thinkers, such as Isaac Newton, who wrote, in his famous work Opticks: "The parts of all homogeneal hard Bodies which fully touch one another, stick together very strongly. And for explaining how this may be, some have invented hooked Atoms, which is begging the Question." Hanson also quotes James Clerk Maxwell (from an article entitled "Atom"): "We may indeed suppose the atom elastic, but this is to endow it with the very property for the explanation of which... the atomic constitution was originally assumed." Finally, here is a quote Hanson provides from Werner Heisenberg himself: "If atoms are really to explain the origin of color and smell of visible material bodies, then they cannot possess properties like color and smell." So, although it is not an original thought, it is useful to bear in mind that greeness disintegrates.
— from the postscript to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (his lovely book of essays from his column in Scientific American)
Why Opium produces sleep: ... Because there is in it a dormitive power.
Moliere, Le Malade Imaginere (1673), Act III, sc. iii.
Striking good or striking bad?
I agree with this point as stated, but think that by thinking about how it all hangs together (or by listening to those who have) before choosing a career trajectory and by choosing a career that leaves sufficiently many options open, one can "have one's cake and eat it too" — getting getting both the epistemic benefits from being on the ground and the epistemic benefits from looking at things in a broader way.
I agree. The best cogs understand their role in the machine, which requires intimate understanding of the machine as a whole. AND they can feel what's going on as it happens.
In response to
Being Foreign and Being Sane
If you didn't manage to notice your retinal blind spot or the mechanisms by which you conjugate verbs in your native tongue, what are the chances that you aren't at least a little mistaken about your true goals and desires and how best to achieve them?
Even though I'm very familiar and comfortable with your thesis, I found that sentence striking.
In response to
LW Women Entries- Creepiness
Generally agree that this is important to keep in mind, but:
Asking for a number instead of offering yours. If I want to call you, I will, but when you ask for my number, I can't stop you calling or harassing me in the future.
It's possible my model is just mistaken here, but my understanding is that people generally expect (straight) men to ask for numbers and (straight) women to offer numbers, and deviating from this script on the male side is low-status. Something like "I can't be bothered to take the next step here, so you do it." Or maybe "I'm not confident enough to ask for your number, so I'll give you mine instead and hope for the best." Agree with the other commenters that offering fake numbers is an option.
I had exactly the same reaction. I believe (though have extremely small data number of data points) that offering a number instead of asking for one would be taken as low-status. On the other hand, I doubt that the balance between having a proposition accepted or denied is often that delicate. Presumably in most cases, by the time you're considering exchanging information, she or he has already made up their minds enough that such a small faux-pas wouldn't matter much.
In response to
Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism
This post inspired me to write an article on Feminism, criticism of feminism, and contrarianism over at FeministCritics.org.
I identified very strongly with your article. I feel exactly the same way and suspect the same things are going on in my brain when I hear really bad feminist arguments. They're somehow more annoying than really bad (even worse!) gender regressive arguments.
This has lead me to question whether I should indulge myself in making my contrarian, actually-gender-progressive, arguments against what I perceive as mainstream opinion (feminism). Feminism really isn't nearly as mainstream as it feels to me. I'm just privileged as a member of the intellectual progressive elite - I got to go to good schools, I'm a professional, I select progressive friends and grew up with somewhat progressive parents. Yes, it was a revelation when I realized how many problems there are with mainstream feminism, but I'm also a product of a pretty rare selection bias in a society that's actually still racist. I actually buy the feminist narrative that there is still a lot of (level 1) sexism in our society, even though I tend to only see the problems with (level 2) mainstream feminism.
But there is a problem here for a consequentialist. No matter how clearly I put my criticisms, they're only understood as "some reactionary rationalization". People don't grasp the nuance and count one more head on the wrong side. It seems like it will lead to better consequences if I spend a majority of time "me too"ing mainstream feminism and biting my tongue about most of the issues in it. Or at least building more explicit feminist cred before pointing out some of the problems.
So this leads me to a question for you: why do you think that, in the face of your realization about why you criticize what you criticize, continuing to do it is the right thing to do?
In response to
Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism
doesn't follow politics / political junkie / avoids talking about politics due to mind-killing
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Introversion and confidence are completely unrelated. You probably weren't implying that, but for anyone who comes across this in the future: introversion is not about confidence, shyness, self-esteem, anxiety or anything of that sort. The sheer amount of people who fail to make this distinction is one of the most irritating things I have come across.
Hmm. Yeah, I agree with you. But booze loosens something up for me. It turns something in my social brain on high. This is not the same thing as confidence, so my wording was bad.